


if the morning light (don't steal our soul)

by shuofthewind



Series: The Trick to Binary Stars [4]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel 616, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Bechdel Test Pass, Blood and Torture, Brainwashing, Canon-Typical Violence, Dark, F/M, Identity Issues, Mental Health Issues, Natasha Is Much Older Than She Looks, POV Alternating, Pre-Canon, Psychological Torture, Psychological Trauma, Swearing, The Red Room, Which Should Tell You Everything To Be Honest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-08
Updated: 2016-03-08
Packaged: 2018-05-25 11:55:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,987
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6194230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shuofthewind/pseuds/shuofthewind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How the hell are you supposed to find your soulmate if you never remember meeting them in the first place? [Pt. One of Two.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	if the morning light (don't steal our soul)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [extasiswings](https://archiveofourown.org/users/extasiswings/gifts).



> This hands down might be the darkest most depressing thing I can remember writing in ages, and I kind of cried at work while I did it.
> 
> All of these things are my own theories about the Red Room and Department X and so should not be taken as canon at all.
> 
> The choppiness is deliberate, since this is part one of Natasha and Bucky, and I feel like someday there may be a part two. Probably after Civil War when I know a little more about Bucky post-TWS.
> 
> Unbeta'ed. Title from Halsey's "Empty Gold."
> 
> I have no soul left. Chapel, bb, I'm sorry I'm gifting you such a sad.

They meet three times before either of them can even begin to remember.

.

.

.

It’s 1956. The Soldier is unaware of it, but since he fell, it has been nearly twelve years. They began keeping him in stasis in 1947, when it became clear that the treatments were only a temporary solution. He’s been woken seven times since then, and each time he’s been placed back into the capsule within three days.

(“He remembers too much,” says the Handler. His name is Karpov. Every time the Soldier sees him, he has grown older. The Soldier is unsure why seeing this man’s face bothers him. “His mind is far too strong. Zola’s made it more complicated than it needs to be.”

“Zola’s always overcomplicated things,” says another man, a scientist, but the Soldier doesn’t remember the conversation when he wakes.)

He’s woken because of Hungary, though they don’t tell him so. They rarely do more than give him orders. The first newspaper he sees tells him it is Christmas Eve, 1956. The second one tells him that a group of reckless students attempted to rebel against the state, and a second revolution is fermenting in Sokovia. The mission parameters are simple. He is to meet up with another asset in place in a district of Nova Grad. He is to kill the man the asset tells him to kill. He is to return to Russia without comment, and present himself to be wiped.

He obeys orders. He goes to Sokovia.

The asset he meets with is a woman with a child. The woman is thirty, or thirty-two, he estimates. Her hair is dyed. She carries six knives and a garrote is woven into her bracelet. The child is perhaps seven. It is the child, and not the woman, who looks at him and says, “Nova Grad is terrible at this time of year.”

There is a scar on his ribs that tingles when she says that. Sometimes, before he is placed back into the capsule, he gets the chance to see himself. Silver marks fleck through the skin, there, shreds of Cyrillic lettering.

“The weather could be better,” he tells the child. His voice is strange, though he is not sure why. The girl’s eyes widen, but she says nothing. She has green eyes, he thinks. Green eyes and curly red hair that’s cut sharp around her jaw. The woman with the garrote in her bracelet pinches the girl hard in the soft flesh of her arm when she believes the Soldier isn’t looking. Later, at night, when the girl is asleep and the Soldier has returned from his mission, the woman informs him that he ought not to have encouraged the girl.

“She is of the Red Room,” she tells him. “She knows better.”

He finishes the job, and is placed back into stasis. He does not remember anything that happened in Sokovia.

.

.

.

It is 1962, she is thirteen, and her code name is Oktober.

 _I am one of twenty-eight young ballerinas_ —

Oktober knows some things aren’t talked about. She knows that three of the girls bear marks that don’t wash away under water, no matter how hard you scrub. She knows that she’s one of them. She knows that Madame treats her harshly in part because of this. (“Should have left the marked ones,” she says when she doesn’t think Oktober can hear her. Oktober has taken to climbing into vents, creeping from room to room, as quiet and careful as a snake. “They present too much risk.”

“They showed greater potential during the tests,” Dr. Chelintsov tells Madame, but Madame scoffs.

“A greater price to pay.”)

 _I am one of twenty-eight_ —

She knows that she has a mark. It is laced around the bone of her left ankle, a dull silver that glints when it catches the light correctly. It is only visible when she changes into pointe shoes, or when she’s barefoot. The rest of the time, she is careful to keep it covered. It is five words in Russian, embossed in Cyrillic.

_The weather could be better._

She wonders sometimes if it is a code.

(She doesn’t ever remember afterward, but Chelintsov takes her into surgery three times to try and peel it out of her skin. The grafts never take. It always shines through again, rising from somewhere deeper than bone.)

Mart sleeps across from her in the hall. She has a mark, too. One day, Mart goes to training, and doesn’t come back. Madame tells the rest of them that Mart has failed, and was returned to her parents. That night, Oktober spies a body bag in Chelintsov’s laboratory, but she does not dare go near it. There is something shaking in her throat that she feels is not quite fitting for a ballerina of the Bolshoi.

 _The training is hard, but_ —

Three days later, Madame comes into the classroom, and informs Oktober that she is to be trained.

“Do not anger him,” she says, as she marches Oktober along, her hand clenched hard at the back of Oktober’s neck. “You will regret it.”

Oktober says nothing, for she rarely speaks unless she is told. She changes clothes as directed, from the soft, clinging fabric she uses in the dance hall, to something thinner, looser. Sparring clothes. Her hands are wrapped. She is told to go barefoot, and she does it, though it makes her deeply uncomfortable. Oktober does not let this show on her face, for Madame is already on a knife’s edge, and she wishes to see what’s waiting for her in the training room.

There is a man standing in the center of the mats. He is much taller than her, much heavier. _Knives_ , she thinks. A knife at the small of his back, another in his boot, another in a holster under his arm. Knives but no guns. He wears heavy boots, and his hair hangs around his ears, much too long. Nothing close to regulation. His left arm is metal, and that means it is dangerous. Oktober does not look at Madame. She watches the man, and she watches one of the Handlers—Petrovitch, she thinks, Ivan Petrovitch, though she is unsure as to how she knows the name—speaking quietly with a man in the uniform of a general. She bows to the general, and ignores Madame’s low hiss.

“I hope this one is not like the first,” says the general. He is looking at Madame. “The program seems to have lost its way in recent years.”

Madame is angry. She is also frightened, which is something that Oktober has never seen before. Something curdles in her chest that she doesn’t have a name for. “The first was a failure in every regard,” says Madame. “This one may not be.”

The general looks at Oktober. “Do you know what you are here for?”

“The glory of Soviet supremacy,” says Oktober, because this is what is expected.

“What is your name?”

Oktober says nothing.

“Do you know what you have been brought here to do?” says Petrovitch.

“To fight him,” says Oktober. The man on the mats doesn’t stir.

“To not die,” says Madame.

She does not die. She doesn’t remember much of the fight, but she does not die. She discovers later (searching through records, through old camera recordings, trying to find a scrap, trying to find anything) that this was the test that cemented her entry into her next level of training.

The man that Madame calls _Zimnij Soldat_ is carried out of that room, unconscious not by her hand, but through sedation. Oktober watches him go with a bloody nose and a broken wrist and the sense that she should be dead but isn’t, and she doesn’t understand what stayed his hand. A week later, the entire day is taken from her by Chelintsov. She recovers only scraps, through nightmares. Fingers loose around her throat, and a voice from a soldier who ought not to have spoken.

“I told you. I will not kill your children.”

.

.

.

It is 1968, and he is brought out of stasis for the first time in sixteen months.

“You have an assignment,” says the Handler. He is a general, and his mustache is grey, and something about that bothers the Asset. “You are the Winter Soldier. You will do as I command, as Handler Petrovitch commands, and as Dr. Chelintsov commands. You will follow your schedule, and be placed back into stasis when your work is finished.”

“Understood,” says the Winter Soldier. He uses the name he is given, always. Something knotted in the back of his head says no, that’s wrong, that’s wrong, but he ignores the small voice because he always must.

( _Always, what the hell do you mean always_ —)

“You will report to the training hall,” says the Handler. “Your assignment is waiting for you there.”

The Winter Soldier nods.

He reports to the training hall at 0600. There is a woman waiting on the mats. Not a woman, a girl. Nineteen. Twenty. She has red hair and sharp eyes and her hands are unwrapped. There is another Handler standing at the door.

“Natalia,” says the Handler, and the girl with red hair looks up and watches the Winter Soldier very carefully before saluting. There is a flickering of silver around her ankle that makes him think of fish scales. “He will teach you.”

 _Teach her what_ , a voice in his head says. He is not sure that it isn’t one of his own thoughts. It should be obvious, the mats, the gear, but he looks at her for a moment and he thinks, _teach her what_?

“Yes,” says Natalia. She watches him with a face like a leery cat’s. There is a burning in the skin of his ribs. “I understand.”

“You will teach her,” says the Handler to the Winter Soldier. “She is a fighter. She must become a weapon. You will teach her.”

 _No_ , says the voice in his head. _God, Christ, no._ It is the Soldier, but it is also not, and he cannot make sense of it.

“You will not kill her,” says the Handler. “She will not kill you.”

“Understood,” says Natalia.

“Understood,” says the Soldier.

 _I can’t do this_ , says the voice. _Christ, I can’t do this, I can’t do this_ —

He lasts a week before the voice in his head overpowers the Soldier. He kills four Handlers and a guard before Natalia puts him down, her hands brutal and her face still like a cat’s, something hidden deep inside that he thinks might be human.

They are both wiped, this time.

.

.

.

It is 1973. She learns later that they have spent the past five years in total developing new techniques to keep the Winter Soldier under control, and have come to a simple conclusion: carrots and sticks. A leash is better than a chain, and loyalty is more easily engendered through emotion.

— _the warmth of my parents_ —

(In forty-one years she will tell Steve Rogers _might not want to pull on that thread_ but then she is only a child, she is twenty-two and she will be given her first assignment any day and she has been told she will work with a partner and she has been waiting to see who it will be, who they will choose for her—)

Leashes and chains and shackles and gloves, and she is Natalia. Natalia—Natalia is all they call her, though she thinks a long time ago it may have been something different—reports when she is summoned to General Lukin’s office. There is a man with a metal arm standing by the desk, looking at the window, saying nothing.

There is another man. He is tied to the chair. There is blood on his face, on his teeth. A hole in his shoulder. She thinks he’s blonde, but she cannot be sure. Natalia looks at him for only a moment before looking back to Lukin.

“Kill him,” says Lukin. The man with the metal arm does not move, watching her with eyes like ice. Natalia has no weapons. She is a weapon. She doesn’t need tools. She looks at Lukin, and she looks at the man in the chair, and she snaps his neck without hesitation.

(This is not her first kill, but it is the first she remembers. The actual first was Karpov, two years dead of poison administered by Natalia. It was pressed into her hand by Madame. There is no record of any of this in the archives, but later, she remembers.)

“Natalia,” says General Lukin. “Natalia Alianovna Romanova.”

She has never heard her full name before. Something in her is shaking. She holds it close to herself in a flight of sudden girlishness. Natalia Alianovna Romanova. She is Natalia Alianovna Romanova.

“Natalia Alianovna Romanova,” says the general again. “This is Yakov. He will be your partner.”

Natalia has blood on her palms when she nods. Yakov straightens. His arms are crossed over his chest. There is a red star embossed on the metal.

“You are due in Cuba in two days,” says General Lukin. “Do not be late.”

.

.

.

“He loses control around her,” says Madame. “This is unwise.”

“She may be able to control him,” says Lukin.

“And if they both go rogue?”

“We kill them.”

“A considerable loss,” says Madame.

“The girl is marked anyway,” says Lukin. “Always dangerous.”

They never consider what should be obvious.

.

.

.

It’s the first memory that really starts to stick, even through the new treatments and the new machines and the newfound ways they have to wreck his mind.

They kill the man in Cuba six hours before the deadline. Natalia is in a sundress, white. Blood has sprayed back against the skirt like raindrops. Yakov watches her as she steps over the pool of blood, over the mess, her toes pointed like a ballerina’s. There’s red smeared over her mouth, and he knows consciously that it’s lipstick, but something in him makes him think vampire. Then he sees the width of her eyes, the spread of her pupils, the way her fingers shake.

It is not her first kill, he thinks. It is her second kill. The first kill had been a ruin of a man. The second kill was not. The second kill is a man they have been watching for three days, a man with a daughter, a man in a uniform and a mustache and a smile. Yakov watches Natalia, and when she lifts her hand to her mouth like she’s going to touch her lips, he takes her wrist and forces it away again.

“Your eyes are very sad,” she says, looking at him.

_Your eyes are very sad._

Blood and white and big eyes and her voice, those are things that he remembers. They cling on, even when he forgets her face.

.

.

.

Six months later, the Handlers still haven’t placed Yakov into stasis, and they are in East Berlin. Natalia stretches her legs out underneath the sheets, and touches the scar on his side.

“I have one of these,” she says.

She knows from her teachers what they are, now. Soulmarks. They’re the first words ever spoken to you by your soulmate, someone who, according to legend, is sculpted for you. “Erroneous,” she remembers Madame saying. “Fallacious conclusions. They have no meaning.” Yakov watches her, carefully. He’s had to cut his hair for this mission, but she can’t make out the look on his face.

“Your ankle,” he says. “It says, _the weather could be better_.”

Natalia looks at the ceiling. There are new scars on her now. A divot below her collarbone from a gunshot. A gash over her ribs from a knife. Nothing like Yakov’s. His whole shoulder is a mass of scar tissue and twisted knots, and sometimes she leaves her fingers pressed to the seam of machine and man and wonders where this came from.

“I can’t read yours,” she says. “What do you think it says, Yakov?”

Yakov watches her through half-lidded eyes.

“You shouldn’t be asking these questions, Natasha,” he says.

She smiles, slowly. He is the only one who calls her Natasha.

.

.

.

They’re in St. Petersburg when it fractures.

They are not Yakov and Natalia, but Piotr and Ekaterina. They are to meet a man, to receive their targets. They work separate but together, now, and Yakov has not been placed in stasis in the full year since Natasha was summoned to Lukin’s office. But the man they meet leans forward, whispers, “Hail HYDRA,” and there’s a roaring in the back of his head.

 _Hail HYDRA_.

 _Hail_ —

“Piotr,” says Natasha. He snaps to her. “We should go.”

“My name’s not Piotr,” he blurts, and then the roaring takes over, and there’s nothing but the screams.

.

.

.

“James,” he tells her in the dark, “James, I think my name is James,” and it tastes foreign on her tongue, _James_ , and it’s not a Russian name, so who is he—

.

.

.

They drag her away from him screaming, and one of the new Widows, the blonde, she laughs and he’s not sure if it’s imagination or reality—

.

.

.

She’s never been put in stasis before but Madame forces her into the chamber and Natalia remembers saying _no, no, no_ —

.

.

.

Department X falls apart and the next time he wakes it’s to a man named Alexander Pierce, and he says, _We need you to do something for us_ —

.

.

.

_You’ll break them._

_Only the breakable ones._

.

.

.

When Natalia wakes, it is the blonde Widow, Yelena Belova, lets her out, a decade older, and worn. There is a scar down the side of her face where Natalia gashed her with a knife, though where and when and how that happened, she’s not entirely certain. She only knows that it did.

“The Red Room has fallen,” she says, as Natalia looks at her. “You are free now.”

_What’s freedom?_

“Yakov,” says Natalia.

“Who?”

Natalia blinks, slowly.

“I don’t know.”

There’s a gold mark around her wrist that says, _I learned Russian for you, you know_.

.

.

.

There is no Yakov, no James, no Soldier. He is the Asset.

 _Again_ , says Pierce. _Again, again, again_.

_I need you to do it one more time._

This machine is not like the others.

.

.

.

“Your mind,” Yelena tells her, “is not your own. You will learn this.”

She learns it. She unlearns it. She is inverted. She is ripped apart. She is sewn back together. She is a Widow. She is a monster. She is nothing. She is a woman.

“Natasha,” she says. She falls apart and rebuilds and falls again, over years. “Natasha.”

“Your body is not your own either,” says Yelena. “You were one of the first. It was the only experiment to succeed.”

She does not age. Or she does. She does not look as if it does, but she feels it. The procedure was performed when she was twenty-one, and so she looks twenty-one. Her heart is bloody and heavy and weighs her down, so she cuts it out the way they cut out her ovaries.

SHIELD lists that Natasha Romanoff was born in 1984. Natalia Alianovna Romanova was born in 1949, and she looks twenty-one, and she remembers being twenty-five. She is twenty-five for another twenty-seven years.

.

.

.

He is only ever the Asset. But sometimes—

— _Yakov_ —

—sometimes he thinks he didn’t used to be—

— _blood and a white sundress and scars on his side that make no sense_ —

.

.

.

It’s six months after 9/11 when Natasha walks in to find Yelena half-dead. She folds up a blanket, presses it to the gash in Yelena’s neck. “You’re too old, if they caught you in the jugular.”

“Fuck you,” says Yelena Belova. She spits blood. “It was SHIELD. They were asking for you.”

“I’m sure they were,” says Natasha. There’s no stopping blood flow like this. Yelena’s already lost too much. She’s too old and too frail and too sick anyway, with the cancer that’s gnawing her stomach away. “Did you tell them anything?”

“I told them to fuck off,” says Yelena, and she dies right there. Natasha kneels in the blood until the body goes cold, though she knows it’s illogical. She closes Yelena’s eyes, and leaves her behind.

She runs from SHIELD for another three years.

.

.

.

_One more time._

.

.

.

It's 2004. She is Natasha Romanoff, she looks twenty-three if she’s pushing it, and they have her pinned in a warehouse in Chechnya. SHIELD all around the front. There’s an assassin waiting for her in here, she knows. She’s run long enough. Natasha puts her hands up, and says, “So just shoot me already.” She doesn’t realize she speaks in Russian until it’s out her mouth, and by then it’s too late.

There’s silence for a moment. Then, up in the rafters, a man stands.

“I learned Russian for you, you know,” he says.

Natasha is decades and decades and decades too old, and she doesn’t move.

.

.

.

_One more time._

.

.

.

She slips into SHIELD like sand in the gears.

Her age is a secret. Clint knows. He calls her _babushka_ sometimes as a joke, and she allows it. Coulson learns eventually. Fury knows. Everyone else is under the impression that her file is accurate. She keeps it that way. She can’t remember most of her life before 1984, and she’s not entirely certain she wants to. She looks at the numbers on the paper and thinks that maybe they have to be accurate, just because of how she feels, but was she really born that long ago, was she _really,_  where did she come from, what did she do, who did she know, can she really have been alive this long and what else can't she remember—

— _will not kill your children_ —

They offer to do memory regression. She rejects it. They offer again. She rejects it. She doesn’t want to know. She _doesn’t want to know._

“Leave her alone,” Clint snaps, and they leave her alone, but she feels as though she’s falling and she doesn’t know how she’ll be able to stop.

“Final question,” says the nurse sent to process her. “I see you have a soulmark, on your ankle. Romantic, not platonic.”

The platonic bond with Clint is a ghost of warmth over her shoulders when he’s not there. The romantic bond is cold around her ankle like a shackle.

“I haven’t met them,” says Natasha. “I don’t think.”

.

.

.

He is in Iran. He sees red hair through the scope. A face.

 _Your eyes are very sad_.

His arm hurts. His ribs hurt.

He fires.

.

.

.

They find her triggers and dismantle them one by one until she’s a defused bomb, sitting in Washington, DC and thinking finally she might be able to open her mouth and not have lies pour out.

It’s 2012 and she meets Steve Rogers. After the Invasion ends, when she picks up a history book and begins to read, she comes across a photograph and starts to scream for reasons she doesn’t understand. The SHIELD therapists say it’s PTSD from fighting the Chitauri.

Natasha travels to Iowa, stays with Clint and Kate. Clint is unraveling. If she helps repair him, then she might not need to repair herself.

Her ankle is cold.

.

.

.

 _But I knew him_.

And there’s a woman, a woman with red hair, he pulls the trigger and he hits her in the shoulder and she comes at him with a garrote and he thinks _Yakov, Yakov_ —

.

.

.

“You might not want to pull on that thread,” she tells Steve.

 _I might_ , she thinks.

.

.

.

Someday, he thinks, maybe. Maybe he’ll know what the marks on his side say. Someday, he thinks, maybe, he’ll follow the thread, knotted tight in his chest the way sometimes he’ll blink and see something entirely different. Someday, maybe.

 _Yakov_ , someone says in his head. And _Bucky_. And _Buck_. _To the end of the line. Your eyes are very sad_.

It’s not today.


End file.
